Review: Love's Labour's Lost (2014) by the Royal Shakespeare Company

     While the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2014 performance of Love's Labour's Lost dealt perfectly with the comedic moments in the play, the over-the-top style of performance drew attention away from the wit of Shakespeare's text.

    While all of the actors delivered memorable performances, three comic talents stood out from the crowd: Nick Haverson, who portrayed Costard with a short "Renumeration!" speech towards the end of Act III, Scene 1 that skillfully realized the full comic potential of Shakespeare's language; Peter McGovern, who played a young Moth with a clearly defined character; and David Horovitch, whose Holofernes was just as accessibly funny as the comic characters who use language most of the audience can understand.

    The play begins with a survey of the luxurious setting, based on England's own Charlecote Park. From the start, the scenery, costumes, and design are all very stylized and luscious. The men, for the most part, are attired as if they are about to play golf, while the women are dressed in blazers, long shirts, and fancy hats. Overall, the design is the physical manifestation of rhyming couplets (a form Shakespeare uses extensively in Love's Labour's Lost). However, the design is unable to find a sincere moment among the superficiality, and the scenery often rises up out of the ground, giving an other-worldliness to the performance that never quite fit. At the end of the play, the characters go off to fight in WWI: a jarringly dark ending after the final song that makes Love's Labour's Lost a comedy.

    The direction by Christopher Luscombe leaned heavily into the stylistic aspects of Shakespeare's text, but the production was lacked variation and had no climax. Act IV, Scene 3, in which all four leading men (Berowne, the King, Longaville, and Dumaine) spy on each other writing letters to the women they love, was set on a rooftop with the men dressed in their nightwear. There was even a teddy bear! However, this scene did not seem like a climax: it was simply another iteration of the luxurious style used since the beginning of the play. In the final scene of the play (Act V, Scene 2), the men put on a production for the ladies. This play-within-a-play was the clearest demonstration of Luscombe's directorial talent: the style of comedy, the costumes, the entrances and exits, and the moments between characters were executed with just the right amount of over-the-top to match Shakespeare's text. That scene would have stood out even more had there been fewer songs throughout the performance.

    This RSC production was broadcast into cinemas and streamed into schools in 2015, and remains available for online viewing during the COVID-19 pandemic with a subscription to Drama Online. The style of acting and timing of comedic deliveries translated beautifully from stage to screen: this is a virtual performance every bit as clever in movie format as in stage format.

    For a fun production of Shakespeare where every audience member (including those new to Shakespeare or even those who dislike Shakespeare) will laugh, I would highly recommend streaming RSC's 2014 production of Love's Labour's Lost.

Photo credit: Alastair Muir for British Theater.com